


Quintessence

by salvage



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Beauty and the Beast, Canon Setting, M/M, some violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-21
Updated: 2018-04-21
Packaged: 2019-04-25 20:53:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14386911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salvage/pseuds/salvage
Summary: “WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY CASTLE,” a strangely mechanical voice boomed from the darkness beside Hux. Hux startled but quickly covered for the movement, turning toward the source of the noise.“You have my father held prisoner,” Hux said, tipping his chin up insolently to hide his fear.A towering humanoid figure lurched forward. Its footsteps were heavy and almost clumsy; its thick, tattered robes swayed with the motion of its body. It wore a dull black mask with silver detail around the eyes and a broad vocabulator over the nose and mouth, the whole mess barely visible beneath a hood that cast it into deep shadow.“This pathetic creature is your father,” the mechanical voice seemed to state rather than ask. Hux supposed inflection didn’t go over so well through the type of modulator the mask included, or perhaps whatever species this creature was didn’t understand tone. “And you’re here to bargain for his release.”“Not at all,” Hux said. “I’m here to make sure he’s dead.”It's aBeauty and the BeastAU, of sorts.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> When the Disney corporation acquired the rights to Star Wars, I'm very sure this is not what they imagined. 
> 
> Thank you so much to Suzelle, who encouraged me to turn a ridiculous idea into the longest story I've ever written, and a deadly serious one at that, and to woodironbone, for a truly excellent editing job for which I'm extremely grateful.

Armitage Hux landed his shuttle with ease in a wide clearing hemmed in on all sides by the scraggly forest that seemed to cover the half of this planet that was not barren rock. He double-checked the environmental sensors; the air was within breathable parameters, perhaps a little thinner than the warm, humid air he was used to on Auros Prime, but he would make do. His academy training had certainly prepared his body to handle environments more difficult than this. He stood from the pilot seat, rolling his stiff shoulders, and initiated the door unlock sequence. The pneumatic mechanism hissed and steamed as the door opened.

He had arrived here following the signal from the transmitter that he had stuck to the inside of his father’s belt buckle several months earlier. He hadn’t known it would be quite so useful at the time, of course—he had merely wanted to keep tabs on the important people in his life. Yet when his father mysteriously disappeared two day cycles ago, Hux’s forethought had proven to be worthwhile.

The clearing was mostly still, though Hux could hear the wind whistle and rattle through the branches of the spiky trees that seemed to crawl halfway up the side of the mountain that rose before him. He checked the receiving end of the transmitter: his father, or at least the sensor, was only a few miles away. He ran his hands down the front of his uniform, a nervous habit he had been trying to break and for which he mentally reprimanded himself. Closing the door to the shuttle, he set off.

There were no data available in the Imperial files for Planet SR-27 other than its coordinates and orbital cycle, so Hux had no idea when to expect nightfall, other than “likely soon” if the rapidly changing color of the sky was any indication. There were no animal noises in the woods but the wind seemed to be picking up, its wail through the trees an almost human voice. Or perhaps it was a human voice: the life-form scans he conducted from his shuttle, he knew, had a limited range when confronted with certain types of high-iron rock. Instinctually he checked the blaster holstered at his side. He was better with a rifle, but nothing in his current mission was conducive to sniping. The pistol would have to do.

What he had earlier assumed was just a strange rock formation became, as he approached, a kind of rough-hewn dwelling. Niches carved into the rock glowed in the approaching twilight, aligned in clear rows indicating multiple stories of a single large building carved into the stone face of the mountain. A stone spire coalesced, from this close angle, into a tower. Hux couldn’t stop a shiver from passing over him. He was on a path, now, a flat, winding surface surrounded by jagged rock walls that sloped at a steeper and steeper angle as he progressed. The path led to a flat surface in the vast sheer rock face that rose before him. A door.

The door was made of some kind of steel, unpolished to allow it to blend into the mountain face at a distance. It was flanked by two huge carvings, almost indistinguishable in the near darkness, whose twisting forms filled Hux with a childhood dread that he had long thought he’d conquered. The door, which Hux cautiously approached, one hand tightly clutched around his blaster, was ever so slightly ajar.

Hux unholstered his blaster and held it with both hands around the grip, finger beside the trigger, and used his elbow to ease the door open. It creaked tremendously.

“Fuck,” Hux breathed, ducking beside the door so as to be out of the sightline of anyone peering out. The distant wail of the wind in the trees was the only sound; it was silent inside the castle. The moment of stillness crept on, and eventually Hux relaxed minutely and peered around the door again.

Inside was a cavernous entryway with a shining, well-polished floor. A huge staircase curved up from the middle of the room, stretching away into impenetrable darkness, and the spaces to either side of it were also shrouded in darkness, clearly masking what could be a whole labyrinth of rooms carved into this mountain. Hux was immediately alarmed. He couldn’t possibly clear an area this large on his own. He checked his sensor again, confirming that his father was, indeed, inside this castle, somewhere close but high above Hux’s current location. The tower. Hux bit back another curse.

His footsteps were nearly silent on the floor, which as he walked over it he could see was tiled in some intricate pattern, dark and light stones interlocking to create a larger design that sprawled across the foyer. Probably visible from the top of the stairs, he realized as he set foot on the first step. He suppressed his curiosity: not now.

The stairs went up and up and up, curving not into darkness as he had initially thought but into the same dim light that allowed him to make out the dimensions of the entryway. He was definitely approaching his father’s location, the signal becoming stronger on the receiver as he climbed the stairs, but he still didn’t see or hear anything that indicated another life form. What was his father doing here?

He passed many passageways that stretched out from the staircase, different floors of the castle, presumably with the rooms whose lights he had seen from outside the mountain–castle. But the sensor indicated he needed to go higher, still, so he did.

Finally, he reached the tower. The spiral tightened as he ascended and then there were only short hallways spiking off the staircase like spokes on a wheel. He was almost there.

A bright light emitted from a room off one of the hallways and Hux instinctively stepped off the staircase, going toward it. This was it, he knew. This was where his father was—clearly held captive, if the bars on the cells he passed were any indication.

Hux slowed just before he reached the brightly illuminated cell and checked the receiver: his father, or whatever was left of him, or perhaps just his belt with the transmitter for some reason, was here. He put the receiver away, readjusted his grip on his pistol, and stepped into the light.

“Armitage?” a familiar voice, though with an unfamiliar rasp in it, immediately called. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I might ask you the same thing,” Hux said to Brendol, raising his eyebrows when he fully took in his father’s rather worse-for-wear condition. Brendol’s puffy, usually pale face was mottled with reddish-purple bruises and his uniform was in disarray, rumpled and dirty, the collar loose and possibly torn open.

“Have you come to r—” Brendol began, but his eyes jerked from Hux’s form to the darkness beside him and his voice immediately died.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY CASTLE,” a strangely mechanical voice boomed from the darkness beside Hux. Hux startled but quickly covered for the movement, turning toward the source of the noise.

“You have my father held prisoner,” Hux said, tipping his chin up insolently to hide his fear.

A towering humanoid figure lurched forward. Its footsteps were heavy and almost clumsy; its thick, tattered robes swayed with the motion of its body. It wore a dull black mask with silver detail around the eyes and a broad vocabulator over the nose and mouth, the whole mess barely visible beneath a hood that cast it into deep shadow.

“This pathetic creature is your father,” the mechanical voice seemed to state rather than ask. Hux supposed inflection didn’t go over so well through the type of modulator the mask included, or perhaps whatever species this creature was didn’t understand tone.

“Unfortunately,” Brendol added.

“SILENCE!” The creature barked, and Brendol jumped. Hux noticed only now that not only were Brendol’s eyes blacked and the side of his face somewhat bruised, but the shoulder of his uniform jacket gaped open to expose an ugly red burn mark, a slash that ran from his collarbone to the outside of his shoulder. Interesting.

The creature stepped forward again, nearly in Hux’s personal space, using its height advantage to try to intimidate him. He squared his shoulders though he could feel his jaw tighten. His palms were wet within his gloves, fingers tight around the grip of his gun. The creature smelled ominously like ozone.

“And you’re here,” the creature stated in that same monotone, “to bargain for his release.”

“Not at all,” Hux said. “I’m here to make sure he’s dead.”

“You what!” Brendol’s indignant voice echoed through the corridor.

“Oh,” the creature said, the syllable almost a cough of static. The creature eased back from where it had crowded up against Hux, the ozone smell still present but less strong. There was also a hint of mustiness, like a closet long unopened, and the cool stone smell of caves. Hux supposed that was to be expected. “So… you don’t want to… exchange yourself for his freedom?”

Hux let out a little incredulous laugh. “Goodness, no. I had rather hoped I wouldn’t have to do the dirty work of killing him myself.”

“You useless fucking bastard,” Brendol shouted, “I should have killed your slut of a mother when I ha—”

The creature held up a black-gloved hand toward Brendol and Brendol’s voice suddenly cut out, replaced by the sound of choking. Hux glanced over at his father and saw him scrabbling at his throat, his flabby, bruised face turning red. Very interesting, indeed.

Hux stared at the creature and, though it was masked, it was obvious the creature was also staring at him. A long moment passed, marked only by the increasingly desperate wheezes of Brendol.

“If I kill him for you,” the creature asked slowly, “will you stay here with me?”

Hux considered the price he would pay to see this done, glancing at Brendol’s face, the burst veins spotting the skin around his eyes and mouth with spots of bright red. It clashed very horribly with his hair. A single evening was no great sacrifice. “I suppose.” 

Though the creature had backed away it was still standing rather close to Hux, and he could see now the texture of the heavy material of the tattered robes it wore, the dull gleam of the metal detailing of the helmet that included what Hux was almost certain was a slit for the eyes of whatever was inside it. Likely a biological creature, though possibly with mechanical enhancements. It curled its black-gloved fingers (five, humanoid construction, Hux noted) and Brendol’s wheezing was suddenly silenced. Hux reluctantly dragged his attention from the creature to his father: if this was his father’s last moment alive, he didn’t want to miss it.

Brendol’s eyes bulged; his mouth hung open, lips purple and disgustingly wet with saliva; the veins that lined his throat and face stood out in stark relief. His eyes were fixed not on the creature that held him captive and was currently somehow choking him from six feet away, but on his son, and Hux clicked his heels together, straightening instinctively into his true military stance, and felt a smile creep over his face. Hux was dead, he thought, as Brendol’s body collapsed to the floor of the cell and was still. Long live Hux.

The black-clad creature turned abruptly and stalked down the corridor toward the stairs, its cloak fluttering behind it. “Dinner is in an hour,” its mechanical voice called toward Hux. “Be ready.”

“Ready?” Hux said weakly at its retreating back. It hadn’t even turned to look at him. This was already somewhat different than Hux had expected.

By the time Hux tore himself away from the sight of his father’s body and followed the creature down the corridor, it was nowhere in sight. The spiraling staircase stretched down into darkness, illuminated by the same strange glow that had led him through the rest of the castle. He descended the stairs slowly, peering down every corridor that stretched away into darkness, identical stone floors lined with identical doors. There was little to distinguish any one from another.

Why had he agreed to stay even for a single meal in this strange castle on this nowhere planet, with a creature about whom he knew nothing? Perhaps the excitement over his father’s murder had clouded his mind, for now that he was faced with the prospect he was filled with an unusual sense of dread. Armitage Hux, son of the recently deceased Brendol Hux, did not feel dread; yet here it was, lancing its cold tendrils through his ribs to constrict around his heart.

As his father’s cell had glowed with an unusually bright light, so too did one of the identical corridors that stretched off the staircase. It was, by the best of Hux’s recollection, only one story above the main entryway. With nothing to lose, he followed the light.

Where the cells in the tower had rough iron bars, these rooms had smooth wooden doors with intricate carvings and ornate iron hinges that stretched half their length, surely just for show. Each door was also outfitted with a curling, worked iron handle. Though Hux expected it to be cool, like the rest of the castle was, the handle to the first door on the corridor was strangely warm to his touch. He felt his face form into a moue of distaste.

The door opened easily and silently; the room Hux entered was nothing like the rest of the castle. It was warmly lit and lavishly outfitted as a bedroom, with a large wooden wardrobe, a four-poster bed with dark bedclothes, and a small sitting area beside a fireplace.

A fireplace?

Hux knew about fireplaces in theory, of course, but he’d never encountered one in person. They seemed hilariously obsolete in a world of artificially intelligent environmental controls and certainly out of place on the sort of military base where he’d spent his entire adolescence. Fireplaces were neither sleek nor efficient. Yet Hux found himself immediately drawn to it, dropping to a crouch in front of it and reaching a hand, almost beyond his own control, toward the ornate mesh grating that protected the soot-blackened cavern. A faint breeze stirred a few ashes within the fireplace and Hux quickly snatched his hand back and straightened. Archaic and inefficient, he told himself sternly.

The rest of the furnishings were similarly archaic and inefficient. The seats in front of the fireplace were upholstered with a plush fabric and reclined slightly: terrible for accomplishing work in. The wardrobe was accented with ornate carvings, as were the posts on the bed; the latter were draped with a fabric that Hux had initially thought was black but actually, when its folds caught the warm light, shimmered a deep red. The overall effect of the room was lush, excessive, and mildly intimidating. Hux tried not to like it.

When he opened the wardrobe he felt a chill rush over him. It was full of clothes that appeared to be in his size. He pulled out a jacket randomly. It was black velvet, double-breasted, with a fringed gold cord looped around the raised epaulettes to create a semi-military effect that Hux personally thought was slightly tacky. The next jacket was more to his taste: it was also black but made of a heavy silk with a slight sheen. It had a tall, severe-looking stand collar and a series of small, elegant gold fastenings that lined the asymmetric closure. He found himself imagining putting it on, his fingers hooking the fastenings in place, the collar snugly enclosing the column of his throat, before he quickly put it back in the wardrobe. He wasn’t staying here, and the fact that the wardrobe was full of clothing that seemed tailored to his body was worrying, not charming.

He would go to dinner with the strange, mechanically voiced creature, and then he would go back to his shuttle and he would return to the military base on Auros and his extremely promising career as a military officer. Planet SR-27 would be nothing more than the location of a memory of one of the more satisfying moments of his young life.

There was still plenty of time before dinner, so Hux left the room and descended to the main floor of the castle. Although he had left the front door ajar, it was now closed. The space to the left of the main staircase opened into a cavernous room that Hux assumed would be the location of the meal, as a large dining table lined with a dozen chairs stood in front of another fireplace. Unlike the one in the room, however, this fireplace was perhaps five feet tall, nearly twice as wide, and stacked with logs as wide as Hux’s waist. Another wall was lined with windows that let in the fading light; as Hux approached, he saw the strange purple-red sky that stretched overhead. The windows opened onto a courtyard that was wholly enclosed by the mountain. The vegetation, clearly cultivated by some sentient being, was rich and green in contrast to the wind-battered, bare-branched trees that lined the outside of the mountain. Leafy shrubs and verdant flowerbeds enclosed by winding stone pathways dotted the expanse of the courtyard. A few lushly foliated trees rose up between the shrubs, their dense branches casting what Hux imagined would be a sweetly dappled shade on a sunny day. As he gazed to the right, he saw a stone patio with a decorative banister and a set of large doors opening to what must be the room to the right of the staircase.

Investigating further, Hux discovered he was correct. The opening to the right of the staircase led to the largest ballroom he had ever seen. Empty and silent it was an intimidating space, the ceiling stretching up almost into darkness, with huge, glittering chandeliers descending down toward Hux. He quickened his pace, the sweep of his clothing and light tap of his footsteps echoing eerily off the walls.

The glass-paneled patio doors opened silently, the handles turning easily in Hux’s hands. Like the door to the bedroom, the metal of the handles here, too, was bizarrely warm, and he was glad to release them. The air of the courtyard was cool and fresh and still, protected as it was from the wind that he could now hear whistling through the distant trees. Stars practically appeared before Hux’s eyes in the rapidly approaching night. The faint light that filtered through the windows of the dining room and ballroom illuminated the leaves of the plants and the pale petals of the flowers that hadn’t closed with the twilight. It was quiet and peaceful and beautiful.

“I see you’ve found the courtyard.”

Hux jumped, much to his own dismay. How could a creature so large approach so silently? He turned to see the creature looking just as it had before, draped in ragged robes, hood obscuring its mask.

“Yes.” Should he not have been exploring?

“Feel free to explore the castle,” the creature said, as though in response to his thought. “But avoid the West Wing.” As Hux tried to formulate a response to this strange statement, the creature continued abruptly. “It’s time for dinner.” It turned on its heel and set off across the ballroom without waiting to see whether Hux would follow.

The creature was almost certainly male, Hux determined as he followed it, barely keeping up with its long strides, and he decided to imagine it as “he” until he found out its actual name. He knew it was folly to imagine the creature as human—nothing good came of attributing humanity to monsters, or even humans, in Hux’s experience—but enough humanoid creatures shared similar secondary sex characteristics that he felt reasonably certain in his designation.

They crossed from the ballroom through the foyer and into the dining room. The table had been set with a single place setting at the head, a variety of covered dishes radiating out from the plate like a galaxy of planets in orbit around a sun. Hux hesitated when he saw the single setting but the creature continued along the table without breaking his stride, pulling out a chair near the opposite end of the table and sprawling in it.

“This is… for me,” Hux said to the creature.

“Yes,” the creature said.

“You’re not eating.”

“No.”

Hux wondered whether it was rude to ask about the mask. He decided against it on general principle. He sat at the head of the table.

“I’m not going to serve you,” the creature said, and Hux thought he could hear a note of levity behind the previously flat, mechanical tone.

Hux removed the cover from one dish: it was a whole roasted pheasant, the skin dark and crinkled and gleaming. He glanced at the creature but wasn’t sure what kind of reaction he expected from the mask. The next dish revealed small roasted potatoes seasoned with some collection of herbs and spices; the next, long spears of asparagus; another contained halved baby Brussels sprouts and fatty shards of the bacon they had been cooked with. There was a bowl of golden-brown rolls and a dish of creamy yellow butter. The table also held a large glass decanter containing a jewel-red liquid.

“And you’re… not having any,” Hux confirmed, incredulous.

“No.”

Hux nodded with a final glance at the creature and began serving himself, standing to cut a wide slice of dark meat from the pheasant’s thigh. After ferrying it to his plate, barely avoiding spattering the dark wood table with the juices, he took a spoonful of potatoes, a spoonful of Brussels sprouts, and a roll (no butter).

After pouring himself a small amount of wine, Hux raised his glass toward the creature. “My eternal gratitude for the service you rendered,” he said.

The creature raised a hand and flicked his fingers as though brushing off the thanks. Hux shrugged internally and drank. The wine was slightly fruity but dry enough to be enjoyable, with an oaky note underneath. It would, Hux knew, pair very well with the pheasant, and indeed he was not mistaken. The meal was perfectly prepared, an entire galaxy away from the mass-prepared military cafeteria food Hux was used to, and it would be months if not years before he would be able to again taste its like. He savored every bite.

“No asparagus?” The creature eventually asked.

“I don’t love the texture,” Hux replied.

The creature’s mask emitted a little sound like static, perhaps a grunt, as though he were thoughtfully storing away this information.

“You know,” Hux said carefully, after taking another sip of wine, “I can’t stay here for very long.” He watched the creature but he was still and silent. “I appreciate all you’ve done for me, of course. But I have obligations. I have a career I must return to.”

“You can try to leave,” the creature said, too casually.

That was a trap if Hux had ever heard one. “And if I do?”

The creature shrugged. “You won’t succeed.”

“You can’t keep me trapped here with you,” Hux said, but his heart started beating faster. He was no longer hungry.

“Of course I can.” The mechanical voice had an airy quality that was somehow even more threatening than when he had been yelling. Hux remembered how the creature had strangled his father without even touching him.

“So I’m your prisoner?” Hux gestured to his abandoned plate of pheasant. “And this is, what, a last meal?”

The creature laughed; filtered through the mask, the effect was truly uncanny. “Of course not.” He was still and silent for a long moment. “You saw how I treat prisoners.”

“Yet you won’t let me leave.”

“You can try,” the creature repeated.

“I don’t want to have to kill you,” Hux said. For all this prisoner nonsense, he still felt a debt to this creature. Not, of course, that he hadn’t killed people to whom he had almost as deep a debt for even more paltry reasons.

“You can’t.”

The offhand tone with which the creature told Hux he wouldn’t be able to kill him sparked a familiar rage within Hux and even before he had made a conscious decision to do so he stood, pushing the chair away, unholstered his pistol in a practiced movement, and aimed it at the creature. When he pulled the trigger his heart seemed to stop and he felt a strange pang of regret course through him. This was his captor, though. He was only doing what was necessary.

The bolt stopped in midair. The creature held up a black-gloved hand as he had toward Hux’s father, catching the red blaster bolt between them and suspending it there, humming with energy, throwing a dull red cast over the silver detailing of the creature’s mask. Hux was as frozen as his blaster bolt was, unable to react but unwilling to lower his weapon, useless though it may be. He would die with a weapon in his hands, just as his father had always intended.

But the creature didn’t send the bolt back toward Hux as Hux had initially thought. Instead he directed it into the fireplace, the energy crackling through one of the huge tree branches stacked there.

“You can’t kill me,” the creature repeated.

Hux realized he was shaking. He finally lowered his weapon, though he didn’t replace it in the holster. “I see I should have negotiated terms before you killed my father,” he said, trying to keep the tremor from his voice.

“There were no terms to negotiate,” the creature said.

“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?” Hux sneered.

The creature shrugged. “It’s just how it is. You’re mine now.”

The words sent an awful chill through Hux. Gathering the remains of his dignity he stalked out of the dining room, finally holstering the blaster. Although he knew it would be a useless endeavor, he went to the huge front door to the castle, still closed, and tried to open it first with his arms and then by pressing the whole weight of his body against it. It didn’t move. Resigned, he went up to the bedroom that was clearly meant to be his. He could stay here tonight and escape in the morning.


	2. Chapter 2

For a disorienting moment after Hux awoke, he could not for the life of him remember where he was. The bed was more plush and comfortable, the sheets softer than those of his military quarters; his first thought, embarrassing though it was, was that he had fallen asleep at one of the outer-rim brothels he sometimes visited covertly during his yearly leave. Yet the room’s furnishings were not playing at decadence, they _were_ decadent. And then: his father. The strange planet, the strange castle built into a mountain. His captor.

Sunlight streamed weakly through the room’s wall of windows. When Hux got out of the bed and approached them, he noticed what he hadn’t yesterday: the windows looked out over the courtyard and its cultivated foliage. The glass did not have the smooth, utterly transparent look of the transparisteel Hux was used to but instead was slightly warped at the corners, some of the panes fully concave or convex, distorting slightly the image of the lush trees and winding stone pathways. As he moved slowly along the wall, the branches and leaves of one of the larger trees were magnified to his view, then shrank suddenly, as they passed from pane to pane. After a moment he gave in to the urge to put his hand up to the windows, skating his fingertips gingerly across the warped glass.

His uniform had seen cleaner days but he put it on regardless. As he was going to escape the castle today, it would not do for him to return to Auros wearing some kind of bizarre velvet getup.

The front door was still locked, though with no mechanism Hux could make out when examining either the handle or the hinges. The ballroom was empty and Hux eschewed the courtyard just to avoid another eerie trek across it. The dining room was also empty, and the only sign anything had happened the previous night was the burnt-black blaster mark in the log in the fireplace. Through a well-concealed door in one wall Hux found a kitchen, as deserted as the rest of the castle, though well stocked with food and with a wide array of gleaming copper cookware hanging from one wall. A copper kettle sat on one of the burners of the stove, as though about to be used, but Hux ignored it. He would take nothing else from his prison before leaving.

The first floor was useless, a circular warren of empty rooms that all led back to each other. Surely there must be another way to leave the castle, Hux thought, and ascended to the next floor. The hallway in which “his” room was located contained a series of bedrooms, all more or less like his, some with pale sheets and gold-painted furniture. None was to his liking the way his was, though he quickly banished the thought.

The next floor in Hux’s methodical search of the castle was a spoke extending from the wheel of the staircase in the opposite direction from the apparently residential hallway of bedrooms. Although everything he had seen thus far had become illuminated with that strange dim light upon his approach, this hallway remained dark. Hux was immediately excited. Perhaps this corridor would yield results.

There appeared to be some kind of hangings on the walls, tapestries with illustrations woven into the fine material, but Hux couldn’t see an area wide enough to make out any image. The hallway stretched on and on, set with a few widely spaced doors whose handles wouldn’t budge to his hand. Finally, he saw an illuminated opening before him: the corridor opened into a wide room. A faint breeze tugged at Hux’s hair, brushing cool fingers over his skin.

This was a master bedroom, or had been, before someone had taken perhaps a blowtorch to it, leaving similar tapestries to those that lined the hallways shredded and half-melted, gouging huge black-edged chunks out of the heavy wooden furniture. A panel of windows was shattered, the glass at the edges of the broken panes even more warped than the other glass had been, curling and melting with a long-past intense heat. But—most promisingly to Hux—the shattered windows opened not onto the courtyard, but onto a half-hidden cove at the outside of the mountain. These windows opened onto Hux’s freedom.

Hux glanced around the room to search for some kind of rope he could possibly use to lower himself down, but stopped when he noticed a table he had previously overlooked just off center in the room. It was a small table, perhaps originally for a lamp or a decorative sculpture, but it held something large and clearly not intended for decoration. It did not gleam in the dull light like the polished wood of the furnishings, but almost instead seemed to absorb the light around it, a black hole even as Hux was nearly upon it.

It was slightly larger than a person’s head—a mask, he realized, remembering the mask of his captor. But this was not the creature’s mask. This mask was half-melted, perhaps once shiny but now the synthetic material had cracks webbing its mottled, burned, gray-black surface. The side of its face was warped hideously. It was unusable, clearly not the mask the creature wore. Yet it was slightly familiar, and the longer Hux stared at it the closer he came to identifying it. He was so intent, indeed, that he didn’t notice the creature enter the room.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?” The creature’s mechanical voice was shot through with static as it boomed across the room.

Hux’s heart jumped into his throat and he spun around to see the creature approaching, its gait swaying even more than usual.

“I TOLD YOU. YOU AREN’T ALLOWED IN HERE.”

“Oh,” Hux breathed, backing away blindly.

“THE WEST WING,” the creature bellowed, nearly unintelligible through the static, “IS OFF LIMITS.”

“How was I supposed to know which direction was west?” Hux squeaked. His back hit the wall—the wall of windows. He felt the breeze stir the hair on one side of his head.

There was a fraught pause, during which the creature seemed to contemplate Hux’s question, and Hux took advantage of it by jumping out the window.

The side of the mountain sloped at a steep but not sheer angle, and by bracing himself with one gloved (thank goodness) hand, Hux was able to slide down it in a semi-controlled descent. His patent leather boots were wrecked, soles and shafts alike scraped nearly through by the jagged rocks, as was his uniform, and a bump before the last several feet threw him off-balance so he rolled to a stop, protecting his head with his hands, one elbow smacking the ground hard enough that his whole arm went numb. Righting himself, shaking, he immediately went into a sprint, not bothering to see whether the creature was following.

He couldn’t follow the path that had led him to the front door of the castle, but he knew in which general direction he should head to get to his shuttle. The trees and rough terrain slowed his progress somewhat, as did, after a short while, the thin air of this planet, though he kept at a steady pace even after his lungs began burning. The scraggly trees didn’t have enough foliage to really shelter him, though he hoped that his dark form would be hidden from view as he dodged between their trunks. Whatever wizardry the creature had used to kill his father from afar and hold his blaster bolt in the air clearly didn’t work at this range, or on such a target as Hux; though he waited for an invisible hand to catch him, or invisible cords to bind him, nothing came.

What did come were the sounds of animals. Hux hadn’t noticed anything like this the evening before, but now he could clearly hear the guttural growls and grunts of some carnivorous beasts. And then, far, far closer than it had been the last time he heard it, but chillingly distinct: a high-pitched whine, mistaken from a great distance for the wind whistling through the trees, but now, several yards away and quickly closing, the howl of a predator.

Oh, good, Hux thought. I escaped a lunatic jailer only to be eaten by wolves.

They came up on him fast, closing in from all sides. There were four, or maybe five, that Hux could see; he stopped with his back against a particularly wide tree so that they could only come at him from so many angles, but he knew he didn’t have a chance. He armed himself grimly, wincing inwardly at the pain that lanced down his left arm from the fall down the mountainside. The wolves were huge, nearly six feet long and likely weighing as much as Hux did, covered in dense, grayish-green fur that seemed to have little bits of twigs and leaves sticking out from all angles. More compelling to Hux at this moment, though, were their long snouts lined with yellowed teeth.

Two approached him from his left, one from his right, and one was directly in front of him: the biggest one, over six feet long, with the thickest fur ruff and a nick out of one ear. Its eyes seemed to glow golden in the bright sunlight. Destroy the leader first, to frighten the followers? Or take out the littler ones?

Hux chose the leader, bringing up his blaster pistol and firing two bolts toward its head. The first struck it in the shoulder as it began to run at him, knocking it slightly off course, and the second went almost to the same spot, causing it to wince away in surprise. Hux took advantage of the opportunity to fire a few bolts at the followers, turning to his left to fire at the two in that direction. He hit one in the side of the head and it went down, though Hux didn’t know whether he’d killed it, turning immediately after he fired to his right to take aim at the—

“Fuck,” he breathed. Two more had joined the one on his right.

Hux shot blindly at the three wolves to his right as the leader shook off his earlier shots and launched itself toward him. He dodged halfway around the tree but the impact of its massive body, and the feel of its huge blade-like teeth, never came. Hux looked up.

The leading wolf was suspended in midair, its mouth still open in a snarl, huge paws extended toward Hux but unable to make contact. He looked beyond it to see the dark form of the creature from the castle emerging from between the trees, an arm outstretched toward the wolf. The moment stretched between them all: Hux, the creature, the surprised wolves. Then it snapped.

The creature jerked his hand to one side and the suspended wolf went flying into a tree, hitting it with a thud, a dull crack, and a smothered yelp. The other wolves turned their attention on the creature. There was a sharp bright squeal and then a low-pitched, erratic hum, and from the creature’s other hand extended a brightly glowing red sword with a short crossguard. It crackled with energy and the creature twirled it expertly, advancing toward the wolves.

The creature swung the sword in a broad arc at the first unfortunate wolf to reach him, slicing it neatly into two separate parts that slumped to the ground in front of him, paws still twitching, fur gently smoldering. He switched the sword effortlessly to his other hand and used it to attack the second wolf, swiping up, but Hux was distracted by the sight of yet another wolf coming toward Hux himself. He shot at it with his blaster but two of his shots went wide, burning uselessly into a tree trunk, and he was barely able to hit it with a third before it was leaping toward him. This one, too, was caught before it made contact, not suspended like the first but immediately thrown backward as though it had hit an invisible wall and bounced off. It connected with a tree with a thud and a squeal.

As Hux sent a bolt into the dazed wolf that had just been thrown off him, he glanced around to survey the situation and saw the massive pack leader had merely been wounded, not killed, and it was stalking swiftly toward the black-robed creature. Saving Hux had distracted the creature, clearly, and he was in close combat with another wolf and did not see the leader’s approach.

Hux’s two paths stretched before him: he could turn around and run toward his shuttle, almost certain to make it while the wolves were distracted by their battle with the creature, monsters tearing monsters to shreds. He could pilot the shuttle away from SR-27, back to the First Order, and think no more about this godforsaken rock for the rest of his life except as the location of a delicious meal and the satisfying end of a man he hated. But…

Hux aimed his blaster at the leader wolf and struck it in the flank just as it launched itself onto the creature’s back, embedding its teeth in the black mass of the creature’s shoulder. The creature’s helmet emitted a staticky noise of pain or surprise. The second wolf, seeing an opportunity, knocked the creature completely off balance and leapt onto him, also tearing into him with its teeth. Hux held his blaster steady and approached: another shot into the leader’s side finally left it prone and motionless, a foot or two away from the creature, and a well-placed shot in the back knocked the final wolf off of the creature. It turned to face Hux and he shot it right between the eyes.

In the midst of a mass of dead wolves, the creature’s still body looked like another monstrous corpse. The thrill of flight raced through Hux again: he imagined the pale curve of the outer atmosphere of the planet giving way to the vast black expanse of space. The familiar lush, rainy landscape of Auros Prime. The uniform hallways of the First Order base where he was stationed. But he found himself approaching the creature instead, and kneeling beside him Hux could see the heaving breaths he was taking, and the minute movements of pain he was trying to make. Hux would help him.

“I’m going to lift you up,” Hux said, reaching slowly toward the creature’s body.

“Don’t,” the creature mumbled, but Hux got one hand under the creature’s torso and dragged him to a sitting position. Even with the creature’s nominal help he was massively, absurdly heavy, and Hux strained with the effort of propping him up.

“How badly did they get you?” Hux asked, more to make conversation than for a true medical report. He initiated that himself, prodding at the jaggedly torn robes and bloody flesh of the creature’s wounded shoulder.

“Fuck,” the creature coughed in a burst of static. “That hurts.”

“It’s not so bad,” Hux argued, though the skin of the creature’s shoulder was torn in long ragged strips and the bite marks went deep. Blood coursed unhurriedly but steadily from the wounds, soaking the creature’s dark robes. “Let’s get you back.”

The creature grumbled as Hux ducked his own body under the creature’s uninjured arm and used his own body as a crutch, wrapping an arm around the creature’s waist. It clung to him. This close he realized the ozone smell was largely because of the sword it used—a lightsaber, if Hux’s history lessons served him correctly—as the scent was fresh and nearly overpowering. The creature also smelled of sweat, though perhaps that was Hux himself.

They made their way back to the path, stepping over twisted tree roots and jutting rocks in silence, the only sound the quiet rattle of the trees and occasional staticky gasped breaths from the helmet that was right beside Hux’s ear. It was easier once they were on the flat path, fortunately, because Hux’s strength after the adrenaline-fueled escape and near-death wolf encounter, combined with the thin air, was quickly ebbing. The front of the mountain–castle rose almost comfortingly before them. The door, Hux noted, was ajar again, likely from the creature swiftly chasing after Hux.

“I don’t know that I can carry you up all those stairs,” Hux wheezed as they stepped over the threshold.

“Just rest here a moment,” the creature murmured, sounding equally drained, and they slumped together at the foot of the stairs. The creature carefully splayed himself against the banister, favoring his wounded shoulder.

“So,” Hux said, after they caught their breath, “do you actually have a name I can call you?”

If Hux wasn’t mistaken, the noise that emitted from the helmet was a laugh. “Ren. Call me Ren.”

“All right,” Hux said. “Ren.” Well, it was better than “creature,” at any rate. “Will you help me get you upstairs, Ren?”

Ren grunted, and they began the exhausting process of ascending the stairs together. Finally they arrived at the long, dark corridor that ended in the room Hux so recently left via window. Choosing not to consider the grim irony of his returning here less than an hour later, practically carrying his injured captor, Hux instead focused on their progress down the hallway toward the cool, faintly lit bedroom at the end. His current objective was to ensure Ren survived his wounds. Anything else Hux felt was extraneous. 

Hux unceremoniously dropped Ren onto the bed; Ren’s mask emitted another staticky noise.

“How do you think I feel,” Hux said waspishly in response to Ren’s pain.

“Medkit,” Ren said, ignoring Hux’s reply, and pointed to the desk across the room, listing precariously to one side because of two poorly repaired legs. Hux found the medkit in the drawer and with great strength of will did not comment on what circumstances would cause someone to keep a medkit in their bedroom.

Hux seated himself gingerly at the very edge of Ren’s bed, immediately sinking into its plushness. Studiously ignoring this, he opened the medkit on his lap and pulled out disinfectant, bacta gel, and gauze. He removed his destroyed gloves, placing them in a neat stack on the bed beside his legs.

“Sit up,” Hux said, and Ren did, so that they were facing one another, Ren’s back bowed, his shoulders slumped, his arms draped over his bent knees. “I’m going to need to take as much of this off as possible,” he warned.

“The mask stays on,” Ren said, predictably. Truth be told, Hux was only slightly curious as to what sort of countenance lurked underneath, and a small part of him was relieved that that mystery would be left to another, perhaps less eventful day.

Hux was left to navigate the many mysterious folds of Ren’s nearly identical outer garments on his own, Ren helping only minimally as Hux lifted his hooded cowl over his head and tossed it to the foot of the bed. He felt extremely aware of the varied textures of Ren’s cowl and tunic and shirt as his bare hands touched each one in turn; the tunic and Ren’s sleeve were warm from proximity to his skin.

Finally, Hux pulled the shredded edges of the shoulder of Ren’s tunic away from the main part of the wound. The long gashes had stopped bleeding, but the disinfectant would likely disrupt the fragile new scabs that had formed. Hux soaked some gauze pads in disinfectant and, without warning Ren, dragged them over the wounds.

Ren’s vocal modulator emitted a noise like engine gears in need of oil.

“Did I mention this would hurt,” Hux murmured.

Ren began to respond but Hux doused the gauze in more disinfectant and pressed it to the deep bite wound. Ren screamed again.

“You don’t know what’s on those teeth,” Hux said mildly. “Best to be careful.”

Ren made another little staticky noise and then was silent except for his quick, shallow breaths.

Hux used another piece of gauze to wipe away the bit of blood that had begun flowing from the gashes, then began to cover the wounds with bacta. Ren’s skin was pale and smooth, not the stark white of some humanoid species Hux had encountered but pale like a human’s, pale like Hux’s, torn open to reveal blood red like Hux’s, too. Beside the several punctures of the bite marks, Hux noticed a few melanin spots dotting Ren’s skin. He felt almost entranced by these little hints of human imperfection that had been hidden under the heavy material of Ren’s robes all this time; he wondered, too, what other unique marks were scattered over Ren’s human body, his warm, pale skin, underneath the cowl and mask.

Abruptly ridding himself of these thoughts, Hux wiped up the excess bacta and laid more clean gauze over the gashes and bite marks, tearing long strips of medical tape to secure it in place.

“That should hold,” he said, placing the last piece of tape. Ren’s skin was smooth and hot under his bare fingers.

There was a fraught pause while Hux looked at the white gauze on Ren’s pale skin and Ren looked at his own hands. “Thank you,” Ren finally said. It felt strange to still hear Ren’s voice through the modulator after Hux had laid bare hands on his broken skin.

Hux stood. “I’ll change the bandage later,” he said awkwardly, then turned and quickly walked out of the room.

It was only mid-morning but Hux was nearly shaking with exhaustion. He found himself at the door to the bedroom he had slept in and, for lack of a better course of action, went in and collapsed in one of the chairs by the fireplace. Sunlight streamed through the window; outside Hux could see part of the stone face of the opposite side of the courtyard and then the sky, a clear gray-blue, cloudless and bright. He closed his eyes, just for a moment.

The sun had changed position when he opened his eyes again, throwing a half-shadow across the stone wall of the courtyard. He was monstrously hungry, having eaten nothing that morning, but a glance at his clothing reminded him of its pitiable state.

Letting his reservations go, Hux took a luxuriously hot shower in the bathroom attached to his room. He stood still and simply let the spray beat over his neck and back for longer than the entire length of most of the showers he’d taken in the recent past. It was strange to not feel limited by military regulations, by his own constant awareness of the austerity required of him as a cog in a vast imperial machine, by the water pressure at the military base. 

The wardrobe held the same slightly disconcerting array of clothing in Hux’s size, but in keeping with his new (temporary) acceptance of Ren’s peculiarly oppressive brand of hospitality he now examined each article with the intent of choosing one to wear. The fabrics of the shirts were fine and light as he skated his fingers over them.

Hux chose a forest green button-down with a black-trimmed stand collar that matched the small, polished black buttons that lined the front and fastened the cuffs; plain black trousers; and a pair of black patent six-hole Oxford boots. The shoes, reassuringly, were about a size too big: a sign that Ren, or whoever had placed these clothes here for him, hadn’t sized him up as precisely as he had initially thought.

By the time Hux found his way down to the dining room, yellow afternoon light was streaming through the windows, muntins between the window panes throwing a grid of shadows over the long rectangles of light that stretched across the polished floor. The table was laid with a few bowls of fruit, most of which he vaguely recognized, and a loaf of a braided, glazed bread beside which sat a large serrated knife. Clearly, Ren wasn’t afraid of Hux using the knife against him; then again, Hux remembered, if a blaster bolt could be deflected so easily, a knife was barely a threat at all. In any case, Hux cut a thick slice of bread and took an assortment of fruit, all of which were at the peak of ripeness.

Halfway through the meal, Hux decided to investigate the kettle he had earlier seen on the stove. The kitchen was silent as ever, yielding no indication of who had set out the fruit or even baked the bread, but Hux was able to easily fill the kettle with water, set it to boiling, and retrieve from the pantry a metal tin of aromatic black tea. Although the implements he used were unfamiliar in the way someone else’s kitchen always is, the ritual of manually preparing a cup of tea was one he had done many hundreds of times at his mother’s home, and it settled him somewhat to hear the whistle of the kettle; to pour the steaming water over the dark, curling leaves; to see the leaves bloom and unfurl and darken the water before he placed the lid on the teapot and carried it and an elegant bone-white teacup back out to the table.

The tea was bitter and delicious, and Hux found himself almost relaxed as he drank it. If he was still a captive, he reflected, he had chosen his captivity here, and apparently that made all the difference.

Half-full teacup still cradled in his hand, radiating warmth to his palm and curled fingers, Hux drifted over to the windows to gaze out over the courtyard. The trees and lush shrubs practically glowed in the sunlight. The advantage of the thin atmosphere, Hux guessed: what plants were adapted to it flourished in the direct sunlight. A bush close to the window was dotted with pale gold flowers, all with petals spread wide, open-mouthed to the sun.

Hux’s near-confirmed suspicion that Ren was indeed human meant that Ren did in fact eat and drink, though whether the helmet was medical or merely cosmetic Hux still did not know. In any case, bringing a cup of tea to Ren seemed dangerously easy to misconstrue, so Hux left the pot on the table when he headed back up to Ren’s drafty bedroom.

“You could fix the windows,” Hux said in lieu of a greeting.

Ren’s mask emitted the familiar staticky wheeze that Hux recognized as a grunt.

“Suit yourself.” Hux approached the bed where Ren was lying in a position similar to the one in which Hux had left him, though he had shoved more pillows under his head and right shoulder so as to relieve any stress from his wounded left side. After a moment of indecision, Hux sat again on the bed beside Ren.

Ren’s helmet turned to look at him, but he said nothing.

“I’m here to make sure you aren’t bleeding to death,” Hux said, threading a bit of exasperation through his words. 

“I’m fine,” Ren said curtly.

“Allow me to be the judge of that?”

Ren stared at Hux.

Hux raised his eyebrows expectantly.

Without any further protest, Ren allowed Hux to slide a hand under his ribs to lift him into a sitting position. His mask let out another pained noise, quickly swallowed, but Hux was immediately suspicious.

“What have you—” In the spot where Ren had been laying was a conspicuous spot of blood. “What’s wrong with you?” Hux nearly yelled, in spite of himself. “Why didn’t you tell me you had another wound?”

“It’s nothing,” Ren said. Even through the modulation his voice sounded strained.

“You’re a fucking idiot,” Hux snapped. The wound appeared to be on Ren’s right side, just above his waist, and Hux grabbed the medkit and circled the bed so he could access Ren’s other side. The bed was wide and Ren was near the far edge, so Hux shuffled closer. “How was I supposed to notice this,” he grumbled, shuffling around in the plastic case until he found a pair of medical scissors.

“What are you doing with those,” Ren asked weakly.

Hux held the scissors with the plastic-blunted end to Ren’s waist and snipped neatly through Ren’s thick tunic. Now that he was looking closely at it, he could tell it was shredded, and though it had taken the brunt of the wolf bite it hadn’t been sturdy enough to withstand those powerful jaws. With the tunic out of the way the torn edges of Ren’s undershirt were visible, and Hux quickly cleared those out of the way with the scissors, too.

This wound wasn’t so bad, more of a lucky scrape of fangs across the curving plane of Ren’s ribs than a real bite. Even so, the fresh scabs had torn open with the effort of sitting up and both gashes were sluggishly bleeding. Hux gave this wound the same treatment he gave the others: first disinfectant, to Ren’s pained, staticky hiss, then the cool smear of bacta.

“These aren’t as bad as the others,” Hux said softly.

Ren grunted.

Hux carefully covered the wound with gauze and taped each side with the papery medical tape, smoothing the edges so they lay flat. Again, his bare fingers skated along the bounds of the gauze and tape so that his skin touched Ren’s. Ren’s skin was smooth and so warm here, too, but the underlying topography was different: Hux was aware not of the hard expanse of muscle of Ren’s shoulder but of the sleekly curving spokes of Ren’s ribs beneath the taut skin.

“Is that all,” Ren said, and Hux jerked his hand away, caught.

“That is all,” Hux said, feeling a flush crawl over his body. He snapped the medkit closed to cover. “No other wounds you neglected to mention?” he asked haughtily, trying to regain his balance.

“No.”

“Good.” Hux slid off the bed and stood, smoothing his hands over the fine material of his trousers. “Try not to damage yourself any further.”

It was only after Hux left the room that he realized he had left his wrecked gloves there that morning, and when he went back they were nowhere in sight.


	3. Chapter 3

As Ren’s wounds healed over the next few days, Hux took it upon himself to serve as Ren’s nurse, as Ren was clearly unwilling or unable to do so for himself. Ren turned out to be a surprisingly amenable patient to Hux’s sometimes overly brusque version of medical care, or perhaps they simply became used to one another: Hux to Ren’s stubborn insistence that his wounds weren’t so bad as they looked, Ren to Hux’s sharp reprimands that he must stop using his left arm if those long gashes were going to heal properly. Ren insisted he didn’t care that the scars would be more prominent if he continued doing what he was doing. Hux insisted that it wasn’t simply a matter of aesthetics, but of health, and he would be damned if he let Ren ruin his hard work. 

Hux had always been a creature of habit, and even transposed to this strange setting he kept up routines: checking on Ren in the morning, making a pot of tea, methodically exploring two or three floors of the castle, checking on Ren in the afternoon. Exploration was, in turns, interesting and deeply frustrating. Sometimes the doors Hux tried opened onto small sitting rooms. Sometimes he found bedrooms much less lush than his; sometimes closets full of identical servants’ uniforms in varying sizes, all apparently unworn; sometimes sparse but orderly storage spaces, walls lined with shelves lined with boxes of (as Hux discovered) pillows or matches or fragrant bars of soap or, once, machine parts, thousands of little identical cogs and springs and rubber-insulated wires. He had, wonderingly, delved his hand into the box of cogs, feeling their coolness and heaviness between his fingers, the slick slide of metal over his skin. But today every door he had tried was locked, which had put Hux in a bit of a mood.

He now entered Ren’s room to find Ren wearing a thin, loose-fitting shirt, the cowl and ruined tunic and thick undershirt nowhere in sight. The helmet always looked particularly out of place; Ren had been wearing some kind of collar with it, earlier, and with the collar removed Hux could see the pale curve of the bottom of Ren’s throat. He tried not to focus on it.

“Just cut through the shirt,” Ren said as Hux approached.

Hux sat in his usual spot at the edge of the bed. “That’s absurd,” he said, looking down at the medkit as he plucked gauze and tape out of it and laid them out on the bed. “I won’t ruin a perfectly good shirt. Take it off.”

“No.”

Hux looked up at Ren’s helmet. Ren mulishly looked straight ahead.

“I could just let you die of sepsis,” Hux threatened.

“You wouldn’t.”

Devolving into a “yes I would”/“no you wouldn’t” argument, though tempting, was a touch too juvenile for Hux’s taste. He gritted his teeth together and readjusted his position on the bed, moving closer to Ren’s side.

“What are you doing?”

“Shut up,” Hux said. He found the hem of Ren’s shirt and lifted it up. Ren’s back was curved as he slouched forward and Hux revealed Ren’s waist, the ridge of his spine, the thick muscles of his back and shoulders. His skin was pale and soft, dotted, like his shoulder, with a few scattered melanin marks. The mottled white line of a scar stretched from the bottom of his ribcage up toward his right shoulder; as Hux looked closer, a few other old scars were visible on Ren’s skin, twisted circular burns or long lines.

Hux focused on the new wounds instead of the old, healed ones: he peeled off the rectangles of gauze that covered the slash marks and the bites, checking for signs of inflammation or infection. Ren gasped in a short breath as Hux prodded the skin beside the deepest bite mark.

Hux spread a little more bacta on the wounds and then covered them with fresh soft gauze, tearing strips of paper tape and smoothing them over Ren’s skin.

“They’re healing well,” Hux said. He lowered the folds of Ren’s shirt, hiding the white gauze, the pale skin, the twisted scars. He paused, then, the medkit beside him, Ren’s broad, muscular back sloping before him. From this position he would almost be able to tend to the shallow wounds on Ren’s right side—but he would have to tuck his own body between the warm mass of Ren’s and the headboard of the bed, hitching one knee up alongside Ren’s hip—no. He got off the bed entirely and circled it as he had the day before, settling on Ren’s other side.

When Hux finished tending to the wounds, he packed away the medkit and turned to leave.

“Thank you,” Ren said.

Hux turned to look at Ren. Between the dark curves of the mask and the black-clad slope of Ren’s huge shoulder, Hux caught another glimpse of Ren’s pale throat.

“For saving me,” Ren continued, his words oddly stilted. Perhaps as though he had never thanked anyone before. “And for,” he waved his hand a little, “all this.”

“You’re welcome,” Hux said.

“I know you could have left.”

The silence stretched between them. Hux’s mind felt strangely blank.

“Well,” Hux finally said, “I didn’t.”

He turned on his heel and fled.

*

Ren joined him for dinner that evening, choosing, as he had the first night, to sit near the opposite end of the table and quietly watch Hux eat. The spread was luxurious as each meal at the castle was: an array of porcelain-domed dishes revealing tender meat, roasted vegetables, halved tubers cooked in butter, soft rolls.

“And you’re still not going to eat.” Hux glanced at Ren’s mask through the billowing cloud of steam that arose from the plate of stuffed mushrooms he had just revealed.

“No.”

Hux had never had any particular love of food: at best, eating was a diversion, at worst, a chore. Yet he couldn’t help but discover a new appreciation when each meal he was served (from whence, he couldn’t ever quite tell) included flavorful, perfectly prepared dishes. Confronted for the first time with food he actually enjoyed, along with his increasing surety that Ren was indeed human and the mask was likely not a medical necessity, Hux was somewhat baffled by Ren’s insistence upon not eating.

“I won’t be horrified by whatever’s underneath that mask,” Hux told Ren, between bites of steak, “if that’s what you’re afraid of.” He couldn’t keep a note of levity from his voice.

“I’m not afraid,” Ren said quickly.

“All right,” Hux said, conciliatory, filing away the information that Ren was afraid.

Ren didn’t make any effort to converse with Hux, so after Hux had consumed a little more wine he took the initiative himself.

“So what do you do here all day?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, surely lurking about while dramatically wearing a cape only takes up, at best, two to three hours of each day,” Hux began.

“I don’t—” Ren sputtered.

“You must have hobbies. Something you do to pass the time.”

“I do not ‘lurk about dramatically,’” Ren said sullenly.

“Of course,” Hux responded. He took a long sip of wine.

“I don’t.”

“So what do you do instead?” Hux asked. When no answer was forthcoming, he continued. “I design weaponry, for example.”

“What kind of weapons?” Ren asked, interest apparently piqued.

“Large-scale,” Hux replied.

“Plasma cannons?”

“Planet destroyers.”

There was a little burst of static from Ren’s mask. “Like the Death Star.”

“Along those lines, yes. I’ve been…” Hux paused, eyeing Ren. How far could he trust him? “I’ve been working to recreate and advance a project left uncompleted by the Imperial Special Weapons Group.”

Ren was silent, but Hux had seen Vader’s burned mask displayed alone on a table in his room like a relic.

“The archives available to me at the base are incomplete, so I’m not sure the Imperial scientists ever succeeded at harvesting and containing dark matter. The plans involving it could have been theoretical, for all I know. Part of the problem involved the difficulty of trapping and focusing dark energy, what they call ‘quintessence,’ and redirecting it as, essentially, a single, concentrated beam.”

“Like a laser.”

“Something like that, yes. It’s all theoretical, as far as I’ve been able to tell, but they call it ‘phantom energy.’” He smiled. “A little dramatic, in my opinion.”

“Why didn’t it work?”

“Well, the Empire collapsed before the project could be completed. The scientists were jailed and executed by the so-called ‘merciful Republic.’” Hux shrugged, taking another sip of wine. “Of course, it’s also possible that there’s no substance capable of containing and redirecting quintessence.”

Ren grunted. They sat in silence for a while, Hux swirling the wine lazily around his glass. The darkness outside had turned the windows into mirrors; Hux could just barely see their blurry reflections, his and Ren’s.

“Regardless, as I was saying, you should think about taking up a hobby. Perhaps it would stifle your desire to kidnap people.”

“I thought you liked it here!” Ren said, lurching forward in his seat.

Even had he not felt blurry and sluggish with wine, Hux’s capacity to be frightened of Ren had, in the last two days, dwindled to near nonexistence. “It’s a very comfortable prison,” he admitted.

Ren’s mask emitted a roar of static. “But you came back!” he yelled, slamming his hand on the table. Then he seemed to crumple, the massive black form closing in on itself. “You came back.”

He had come back, though he had been avoiding a careful examination of his reasons why. “I did,” Hux said, rising as elegantly as he could from the table. “But I won’t stay forever, you know.”

*

Hux had a mild hangover the next morning. He took a hot shower, closing his eyes to the spray and letting it overcome the pounding in his head. When he turned the faucet off, his skin was flushed pink. The soft gray towels here were a welcome contrast to the old, too-frequently-washed towels Hux was used to. He pressed the towel to his face, ran it over his hair, blotted water from his shoulders and chest and slim arms before draping it around his waist and stepping out of the shower into the steam-filled bathroom. He slicked his wet hair back; his face, in the half-fogged mirror, looked older, more angular like this. Why had he come back?

Self-conscious, suddenly, about the ivory whites and forest greens and almost iridescent silver grays of the rich wardrobe Ren had provided him, Hux dressed in all black this morning, buttoning his shirt all the way to the collar, tugging tight the laces to his boots. Why had he come back?

The dining room was spacious and silent as ever, the table laid with a plate heaped with small round pastries drizzled with a sweet glaze and the same selection of slightly strange fruit at the peak of ripeness. Hux bypassed it all on his way to the kitchen. Why had he come back?

Kettle. Water. Flame. Tin of loose tea. Teapot, teacup, finely woven mesh strainer. The bloom of the leaves, the spiraling darkness threading through the steaming water. Why had he come back?

Hux drank a cup of strong black tea while sitting at the table and warily eyeing the plate of pastries. Clear morning light illuminated the trees and bushes in the courtyard, a bare triangle of yellow-white sunlight just beginning to spill through the windows across the dining room floor. Hux topped off his tea and took the small white cup with him as he left the room.

The ballroom was as unnerving as it had been before and Hux walked through it quickly, cradling the teacup in his hands. His footsteps echoed off the shadowed corners of the ceiling. In contrast to the dark, empty, dead room, the courtyard, framed picturesquely within the wide windows at the far end of the room, seemed bright and alive, warm sunlight slanting over verdant greenery. At this point he was mostly used to the strangely warm, almost responsive metal of the door handles of the castle and the easy way the doors seemed to swing open for him. The courtyard spread before him, the outdoor air cool and fresh, clearing Hux’s still-fuzzy mind when he took in a deep breath of it.

There were no chairs on the patio, but around its perimeter curved a low banister dotted at intervals with small sculptural elements. The banister itself was just high and just wide enough for Hux to sit on, and so he did, placing his teacup beside him and half-turning so he could look out on the lush greenery and winding rustic paths of the courtyard.

Why had he come back?

He had felt gratitude, certainly, toward the man who killed his father, and perhaps even a kind of kinship discovered through shared hatred. That his father had ostensibly been a prisoner the same way Hux had, and yet Hux had been treated so differently—that, too, aroused a perhaps egotistical sympathy toward his captor, who clearly liked him and wanted to treat him well. And then the matter of the wolves. Hux remembered, again, Ren’s dark form illuminated red by his lightsaber, the bright gleam of the silver detailing of his mask. The sight of the massive wolf suspended impossibly in the air before Hux. The staticky noise of pain Ren had let out as a wolf knocked him to the ground. Ren’s bare skin, smeared red-brown with dried blood, warm under Hux’s touch.

Out of the corner of his eye, Hux saw the motion of the door; from the impenetrable darkness of the ballroom lurched Ren’s familiar figure. He was draped in a similar set of robes to those that had been ruined in the wolf attack; the pale, curved line of his neck that Hux had glimpsed was now hidden under the dark collar and jagged-edged cloak. He stood in the tall half-arch formed by the single open door and they looked at each other. Hux found himself almost unbearably curious about what was under the mask.

“I have something to show you,” Ren said. Then he turned and disappeared into the ballroom.

Hux barely restrained himself from rolling his eyes at Ren’s back before he hopped off the banister and followed him back into the castle. Ren swept through the ballroom and up the staircase, his robes billowing behind him dramatically. Hux considered the strong possibility that this was what Ren had wanted to show him.

They ascended past the hall of bedrooms and the West Wing, where Ren slept, and another mostly empty corridor that Hux had explored the day before with no result. Ren turned down the fifth-story corridor, sweeping past the doors that lined the hallway and coming to an abrupt halt at the final one.

The door opened to reveal a three-screen data array and a sleek black control terminal. Hux stopped just inside the threshold. Whatever he had expected, this was not it. As he watched, Ren leaned over the terminal and powered it on. The screens flickered to life. They were older-style data screens, likely from the Imperial era or just afterward. Ren stepped aside to reveal a menu, which Hux approached the terminal to read.

“Oh, my god,” Hux said involuntarily. He leaned forward, taking control of the terminal, and scrolled through the list items. “These are… classified.”

“I thought those would be the ones you’d want to look at,” Ren said. His voice sounded softer than it had before, almost hesitant.

Hux selected a project randomly. His breath caught in his throat. “Lightspeed tracking,” he murmured. It would take him days, if not weeks, to go through these classified Imperial research files. Some were huge, containing sub-menus of tens or hundreds of items. There were blueprints, lists of equations, hundred-page documents, images, memo chains between scientists and Imperial officers whose names he recognized from his own research. Every weapons project he had ever studied was listed here in its full, un-redacted form, blueprints whole and painstakingly sketched, every document with every word intact.

“All the publicly available files are also on there,” Ren said, “though you’re probably familiar with those.”

“Yes,” Hux said absently, and then Ren’s words registered. “It should be useful for cross-referencing, though.”

Hux found the folder for Project Celestial Power and immediately opened three different documents from the project, one on each screen, already skimming through them for new information. Some of these documents he had seen in their redacted form, black bars hovering infuriatingly over crucial information, but some he had never seen at all, pages of calculations that were meaningless to even Hux, complex equations in the service of channeling and dispersing energy in absolutely massive quantities.

“Do you… like it?” Ren asked.

Hux had almost forgotten he was there. Reluctantly, he dragged his eyes from the screens and looked at Ren standing between the data console and the open door. Ren’s arms hung awkwardly at his sides, his whole body stiff and unnatural.

“This is amazing, Ren,” Hux said. “This is—I would have to work for _years_ to achieve the rank at which I would have security clearance to read these files. I don’t even know if we _have_ them all; there’s a possibility not all of this information was rescued from the Imperial Archives on Coruscant before the Republic took over. These archives are invaluable.”

“They’re yours. Do whatever you’d like with them.”

“Whatever I’d like?” Hux repeated.

“Your weapon. Your dark matter thing.” Ren gestured to the data screens. “Do whatever you need to do.”

“Of course,” Hux said numbly. “Thank you.”

As he watched, Ren turned and swept out of the room. Hux stared after him as he retreated down the hallway: his swaying, almost loping gait, the billow of his tattered robes, the stiff way he carried his arms. He found himself wondering whether the wound on Ren’s side still pained him, whether his left arm was regaining its range of motion. Shaking these thoughts away, he turned back to the data screens. He had work to do.

*

Hux worked. He emerged from the archive room at strange times throughout the day and night and stumbled down the huge curving staircase and through the empty dining room to the kitchen, making pot after pot of black tea, forgetting about it as it steeped and then drinking the tepid, bitter tea anyway. Sometimes Ren would come to check on him and he would point to something on the screen and ask Hux to explain it, and Hux would, as patient as he could be for the man who had bestowed upon him this wealth of knowledge. Ren seemed genuinely curious most of the time, attentive to Hux’s simplified explanations, asking questions at the right parts. Hux found himself enjoying Ren’s visits, viewing them not as an interruption in his work but as a useful period of reflection.

Mostly, though, Hux was alone, and when he closed his eyes he saw flickers of Aurebesh letters against the insides of his eyelids, or the sweeping curve of huge blueprints increased to two hundred or four hundred times their actual size so Hux could read the minuscule writing annotating the schematics. He became intimately familiar with the handwriting of crystallographers Galen Erso, characters cramped together and sloping almost precariously to the left, and Feyn Vann, whose looping scrawl was almost unreadable, and those who worked in their footsteps, Corash Lithelen and D’ella Surem, who had theorized about not just the conductive power of kyber, as previous researchers had discovered, but the possibility that kyber crystals could transmute dark matter into a different form entirely.

There were thousands of pages Hux had never before seen regarding phantom energy and its hyperspace tunneling properties—the process by which the massive amount of energy stored by the hypothetical kyber deposits Lithelen and Surem discussed could be released over vast distances nearly instantaneously. Their reports were interspersed with pages and pages of calculations and theoretical diagrams, all of which Hux read voraciously, searching for an inconsistency or a math error or a theoretical quibble. He found nothing. The calculations were perfect.

Project Phantom Star, a peculiarly fantastical name for a particularly vicious project, attempted to bring together Lithelen and Surem’s theories about the transmutation of dark matter to create a weapon even larger than either of the Death Stars had been. The project was never finished; as Hux read through the file chronologically, checking the date of each report and memo and blueprint, he saw the approach of the fall of the Empire. And, though he was expecting it, there was the end of the available material: a half-finished sketch of the oscillating containment field that would allow for less energy expenditure in containing the dark matter than a static field, dated to three days after the Galactic Concordance. It was brilliant, of course, but work that could easily be completed by today’s engineers. The phantom energy theories were the true innovation of the research project. And Hux would use them.

After reading the last information on file regarding Project Phantom Star, Hux abandoned a half-full yet room-temperature pot of oversteeped, bitter tea on the table that had appeared beside the data console twenty to twenty-five hours previously, without his awareness, and he went to his room and slept for approximately fourteen hours. He awoke in the late afternoon, his shirt somehow unbuttoned to mid-chest and wrinkled almost beyond recognition. His whole body felt limp and sleep-warm. When he rolled to a sitting position, a few strands of hair fell across his forehead. The wall of the courtyard visible beyond the window was half-shadowed, the sky beginning to fade from bright daytime gray to its usual twilight red-purple. He thought of the warm slant of sunlight over the smooth stone walls of the castle and the fragile, near-translucent green leaves of the trees whose tallest branches he could just see out the window. He thought of the yellow dwarf star at the middle of this system whose light he was seeing. And he thought of the enormous amount of energy this star generated.

The Phantom Star plans would work. And it would be Hux who would bring them into fruition; Hux himself would appoint the engineers and oversee the final blueprints. Hux’s handwriting would appear in the Order’s classified archives for some future cadet to decipher. Bolstered by this new sense of purpose, Hux headed down to the dining room to eat his first real meal in almost three days.

The scent of the fat-rich skin of the perfectly prepared fowl that was revealed from under the familiar porcelain dome turned Hux’s stomach and he quickly replaced the lid, a puff of steam escaping and dissipating in the cool dining room. Hux pushed the dish farther away from his plate, instead taking three of the soft yellow-brown rolls and the small dish of butter and methodically buttering and eating the rolls.

“You should eat more than that,” Ren said from just behind Hux; Hux flinched with his whole body, dropping the butter knife on his plate with a ringing clatter.

“Stars, Ren,” Hux said shakily.

Ren rounded the table and sat in his usual seat. “I’m… sorry.”

Hux picked up the knife and resumed buttering his roll, hands trembling only slightly, waiting for his heart rate to decrease. He glanced up at Ren’s impassive helmet.

“I take it,” Ren said slowly, as though trying a new tactic, “you’re still enjoying the archives.”

Hux huffed a little laugh. “Yes, I suppose ‘enjoying’ is the word. They provide a wealth of information, some of it quite compelling.”

“Have you… made progress on your weapon?”

“With the extent of information the weapons group gathered on its creation, I’m not sure I can say it’s my weapon,” Hux said, fully intending to claim sole ownership over the project as soon as it began.

“So, yes,” Ren said.

Hux smiled. “Yes.”

“Good.”

Hux ate more of his roll, eyes fixed without seeing the smooth porcelain domes of the untouched dishes arrayed before him. “There’s one problem, though.”

Ren emitted a staticky noise of inquiry.

“Barring, of course, the possibility that the entire concept of dark matter conversion is flawed and the project has absolutely no chance of working.”

Another staticky noise.

“The weapon is designed to be, essentially, the size of a planet. Ideally, it would be built not inside a manmade structure but directly into a planet itself. A planet’s natural magnetic field would work in tandem with the generator’s containment field to hold the energy in place and keep it stable as the weapon is charged. But the containment and eventual transmutation of dark energy into phantom energy on such a scale would require a massive amount of kyber crystals, according to Lithelen and Surem. They write, and I’m inclined to believe them, that nothing else in the galaxy can channel energy on the scale required for this weapon.”

“They’re right.”

Hux jerked his head up to look at Ren. “I’m sorry?”

“They’re right about the kyber crystals. Nothing else concentrates or resonates with energy the way kyber does.”

“What do you know about kyber crystals?”

Ren shrugged his broad shoulders. “I’ve been to the Crystal Caves at Ilum.”

“You’ve fucking what,” Hux said.

“Twice,” Ren murmured.

“You’ve fucking _what_ ,” Hux repeated.

“Do you even know what a lightsaber is?” Ren said.

“Of course,” Hux lied instinctively.

Ren huffed, then reached into his robes and extracted a metal object, leaning forward to place it on the table between them. It was a slim cylinder, perhaps eleven inches long, with cross-shaped protrusions at one end where the quillons extended. It looked almost unfinished when Hux examined it, an exposed red wire snaking up its length almost as an afterthought, disappearing into what looked like a broad crack just below the crossguard. The metal looked tarnished and unevenly worn, probably never polished. Hux itched to touch it.

“You can,” Ren said.

“I can what?” Hux asked, still enraptured by the deactivated lightsaber.

“Touch it.”

Hux’s mouth opened. “Oh,” he said belatedly. He stood and rounded the corner of the table, closer to the saber, closer to Ren. He picked it up. It was heavy but not as much as Hux had imagined, as though its visual weight surpassed its physical. It was perfectly balanced in his hand. He glanced to Ren, but Ren was silent. Hux switched it on.

The lightsaber crackled to life, immediately filling the room with the scent of ozone. The blade hummed powerfully. The blade and quillons emitted intermittent sparks, excess energy lancing down the blade so that it flickered and sizzled in the dim light. Although the hilt felt balanced and steady in his hand, the overall impression Hux got from the weapon was instability.

“It’s not supposed to be sparking like this, is it,” Hux said to Ren, still looking in wonder at the blade.

“The crystal is cracked. That’s why it needs the vents.”

Hux swung the blade in a small arc, testing the heft of the weapon as it would feel in combat. The blade sliced through the air effortlessly. Hux could see the appeal: that the blade was made of energy meant that it added no excess weight to the hilt, allowing its wielder to fight for longer than they could with another close-combat weapon, such as an electrostaff, without tiring. It still had the profound disadvantage of requiring close combat at all, of course, though if the old Imperials’ tales of Lord Vader deflecting blaster bolts with his saber were true, well…

Before he could go any further, Hux deactivated the blade. Like everything else in this castle, the plush chairs and the fireplaces and the useless garden, this weapon was antiquated, a relic of a less advanced age. He replaced it on the table before Ren with hardly any reluctance at all.

Ren immediately reached toward it; instead of taking it back, however, he released a catch and lifted off the front half of the outer casing of the hilt. Hux peered closer. Inside he saw its mechanisms: the repeating coppery circles of the power field conductors that lined the lower half of the hilt, surrounding some kind of power cell; above that, encased in the upper part of the hilt, was some kind of conductive or focusing mechanism supporting, at the intersection of the vents from which the blade and quillons emerged, the crystal itself.

“The kyber crystal focuses the energy generated by the power source, creating the blade,” Ren said, somewhat unnecessarily.

“Why… why is it cracked?”

Ren’s mask emitted a staticky noise and a kind of twitch moved through his massive dark form. “It doesn’t matter.”

“All right.” Hux filed this, too, away in his mind for further contemplation.

“The Empire overmined Ilum,” Ren said as though nothing had happened. “They stripped most mineral-rich planets of their resources.”

“Yes, I know,” Hux said; Ren knew Hux knew this.

“But not all of them. In the… in old records, there’s talk of a planet with a kyber core.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Is it?”

“What records? Who writes about this?”

A burst of static. Ren replaced the front plate of his lightsaber with a few metallic clicks, smoothing his gloved hands over its mottled metal surface. “The Jedi,” he said softly.

“The Jedi,” Hux scoffed. “Those crackpots?”

“A planet with a kyber core would be able to support your weapon,” Ren continued.

“If it exists.”

Ren shrugged.

Hux felt uncomfortable standing over him so he pulled out the chair beside Ren’s, angling it to face him. They both looked at the lightsaber.

“Any planet so rich in kyber would surely have been thoroughly mined by the Empire,” Hux eventually said.

“But they wouldn’t have disturbed its core for fear of destabilizing it.”

“Perhaps. Regardless, it should be listed in the Imperial Archives.” The trees and shrubs of the courtyard were barely visible in the blue-black night; the long table was faintly reflected in the windows, the figures of Hux and Ren just shadows on the warped glass. The dining room was quiet for a long time while Hux considered just how to approach the problem of finding the kyber-core planet. Ren’s lightsaber still sat between them on the table.

Ren sighed, a soft burst of static rushing through the vocal modulator. “You’re going to build this weapon.”

“Well—yes.”

“You can’t do that here,” Ren said, his voice almost gentle in a way Hux had never heard before.

“No.” Hux found himself modulating his tone to match Ren’s.

“You should—go. Back to Auros Prime. Back to the First Order.”

“You’re letting me leave?”

“I release you,” Ren said.

Hux’s breath left him in a rush.

“Oh,” Hux’s mouth said, instead of _it’s about time_ , or _thank you_. The relief he kept expecting to well up within him remained strangely absent. Ren was silent. “Thank you,” Hux said hollowly.

Ren grabbed the lightsaber from the table and stood abruptly, his chair shuddering backward with a sharp noise against the stone floor. “You may leave whenever you wish,” he said, but he didn’t look back at Hux as he left the room.

Hux was left staring after him, not for the first time but likely for the last: his loping gait, his stiff shoulders, the fluttering movement of the jagged edges of his cowl and tunic. Some emotion Hux didn’t care to identify began to claw its way up his throat, seeming to swell grotesquely for a hideous moment before he viciously suppressed it. A final glance at the courtyard windows revealed only his own dim silhouette. Hux, too, left the room.


	4. Chapter 4

Although Hux’s shuttle was only several miles away from the castle, Hux did not relish the thought of making the journey in the dark, considering that he had nearly been killed by wolves here in broad daylight. The decision to wait until morning served him best, anyway, as he was able to transfer almost the entirety of the Project Phantom Star files onto two portable data drives so that he would not have to rely on a promotion or special dispensation to access the Order’s still-classified files. He was also able to take the time to choose appropriate clothing to wear for his return to the military base, as his uniform had been utterly ruined. And he was able to take one last hot shower in his own private bathroom with the soft gray towels.

Hux slicked his damp hair back and buttoned his black shirt up to the collar. He tightened the laces to his boots and strapped his holster around his waist, situating his blaster at his hip as usual. It was momentarily strange to feel it there again, like a relic from a life he had almost forgotten, though he had barely been here for two weeks. He checked that he had the data drives and then, in a moment of sheer impulse, he began to ascend the stairs that would lead him to the West Wing. But after only two steps he thought the better of it and turned around, heading down the huge staircase, across the wide foyer, and out the massive castle doors into the sunlight.

Hux’s shuttle was untouched, thankfully, and its ramp opened to lead him to its familiar sleek black-and-red interior. Its black metal and polished glass were a jarring contrast to the matte gray stone and lush dark wood furniture of Ren’s castle, but it was what he wanted, he told himself sharply. It was what he needed.

The ship hummed to life all around him, display panels lighting up with readings about the ship’s power capacity, engine function, hyperdrive status. He went through the startup sequence automatically, his hands flipping the requisite switches in the proper order as though independent of his mind, which was somewhere else. (Back at the castle. He ruthlessly banished the thought.) He programmed the ship’s autopilot, too, almost without thinking, entering the coordinates to Auros Prime, double-checking the computer’s hyperspace course. (Back with Ren.)

The shuttle rose off the ground, shaking the trees at the edges of the clearing with the pressure of its propulsion jets. Hux shot it into the air with a vicious motion of his arm and it obeyed his commands effortlessly, speeding through the thin atmosphere. A light flashed informing Hux that its wings had fully extended just as the pale gray sphere of the atmosphere opened before him to the yawning black expanse of space. He checked the hyperspace course one last time and initiated the hyperdrive, the bright points of stars visible through the transparisteel blurring and extending before him.

There was no sense associating any particular emotion with Auros Prime because Hux’s life was, at the moment, inextricably bound with it, it being the location of the military base at which he was currently stationed. Whatever he felt about it, he was forced to reside there, so there was no reason to feel anything at all. And indeed the sight of its blue-green atmosphere appearing before Hux as his ship eased out of lightspeed, wreathed in the thick white clouds that were the source of its continual soft misting rain, inspired no real emotion within Hux: it was the planet he was supposed to be on, the planet from which his carefully planned and long hoped-for future must arise, and here he was.

Hux’s shuttle descended through the damp Auros atmosphere, condensation immediately appearing on the window of his ship. It was so different from the cool, thin atmosphere of SR-27—but Hux quickly banished this train of thought, it being useless to his current purposes. The small data drives felt disproportionately heavy in his pocket. If he should feel anything, it should be anticipation and even pride for the project he would be able to begin using the archival information about Project Phantom Star. His future would be bright, he told himself sternly.

The atmosphere of Auros felt like a physical object pressing upon Hux when he emerged from his ship, thick and heavy, weighing on his shoulders, winding its damp way into his lungs. The lush forests he knew surrounded the landing field of the military complex were completely shrouded by fog; he could barely see the massive gray face of the closest building.

“Look who it is,” said an unfortunately familiar voice from Hux’s left.

“Fuck,” Hux breathed.

“Don’t see the Commandant around, though,” another voice said, “only his bastard.”

A group of three young men and a woman rounded the sleek black mass of Hux’s shuttle, spreading themselves in a half-circle around Hux. He glanced between them. He recognized all of them as former Commandant’s Cadets, now just regular-grade assholes who still believed the special recognition of Brendol Hux back at the Academy entitled them to something special.

“Careful you don’t strain something making such acute and incisive observations about y—” Hux began, but the largest of the group dodged forward, his right arm already swinging toward Hux. Hux barely had time to step into a defensive stance and bring up his left arm to block the punch. It was an attack typical of these idiots, Hux thought, a straightforward, fully telegraphed punch, giving ample time for the enemy to see it coming and counter. Almost disappointing.

“Where is he?” asked the man who had just tried to punch Hux. Garel Oren styled himself the leader of this little clique, as the largest and most garrulous of the lot. Hux assumed he needed lackeys because he didn’t have the brain capacity required to remember his own identification number or the location of the mess hall on his own. “You haven’t finally grown some balls and killed him, have you?”

“I have no idea where my father is,” Hux spat; he wasn’t even lying. He really didn’t know what Ren had done with Brendol’s body.

“He’s been missing for nearly two weeks,” Oren said. “So have you.”

“Congratulations! I didn’t realize you had been promoted to captain of my regiment. But wait,” Hux continued, leaning forward to squint dramatically at Oren’s uniform, “it appears you still have the rank of lieutenant.” He was well aware that Oren had been agitating for a promotion for several months, with no success. He was walking a dangerous line here, but he couldn’t help himself. He straightened and looked Oren in the eyes. “Looks like you still don’t have the authority to demand anything of me.”

The blow to his stomach winded him, forcing him to double over, his arms instinctively crossing over his torso. Before he could recover, the men to each side of him grabbed his upper arms, pinning him against the side of his shuttle.

“Without your uniform, you’re barely even in the First Order,” Oren said. He drew Hux’s blaster out of its holster and Hux barely stopped himself cringing away from Oren’s reaching hand. “I can hardly be blamed for detaining an intruder on our base.”

“Is this really the game you’re playing?” Hux wheezed.

“Where’s the Commandant?” Oren asked.

“I don’t know.”

Oren hit him in the stomach again. Hux coughed as the pain radiated through his body.

“If you’re attempting to incentivize me,” Hux began, but Oren punched him in the face this time. His head whipped to the side, the side of his head and his ear slamming into the side of the shuttle. Pain swept out from his cheek across his face in rolling, hideous waves.

The man holding his left side, a stout, rat-faced idiot called Follett, spoke up. “Maybe check his shuttle logs,” he said. “It’ll show where he’s been.”

Hux’s pain was abruptly drowned in a rush of cold fear. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.

“Caskey,” Oren said to the woman, who had hung back when the men grabbed Hux. Oren nodded toward the door to the shuttle, and Caskey went.

Hux was nearly shaking with the effort of not responding to this new development, not letting these monsters know how very much he could not have them going to SR-27. Any reaction would give him away, he knew. Caskey disappeared into the shuttle.

“Don’t touch my _fucking_ shuttle,” Hux growled.

“Doesn’t seem like you, what was it, have the authority to demand anything of me,” Oren said, a hideous lightness in his voice. Hux’s anger was a physical thing inside of him.

“It’s some nowhere outer rim planet in some system I never heard of,” Caskey said from inside the shuttle. Hux bristled.

“Copy the coordinates,” Oren said. “We’ll throw him in the brig and head out.”

“The _brig_? Are you idiots out of your fucking minds?” Hux yelled.

An explosion happened at Hux’s jaw, snapping his teeth together and slamming his head back against the side of the shuttle with a deafening noise. Oren had hit him with the butt of his own blaster, Hux realized as his head fell forward, his ears ringing, the hot rush of blood filling his mouth.

“We’re simply trying to protect our base,” Oren said, though Hux could barely hear him over the ringing. “We can’t possibly be blamed for overenthusiasm.”

Hux spat a mouthful of blood directly at Oren’s face; it spattered thickly over his cheek and nose and mouth. With disgust, Oren wiped at his face with his sleeve.

“Take him to the brig,” Oren said to his lackeys, never taking his eyes off Hux. “I’ll get a shuttle ready.”

Hux was half-carried, half-dragged away from his shuttle; he looked back over his shoulder but Oren and Caskey were heading away, apparently readying their own instead of taking Hux’s. Small mercies. Follett pushed on his shoulder to nudge him forward again.

Building D-3, which functioned primarily as an equipment hanger and repair bay, was equipped with a series of small holding cells in sub-basement 4, though Hux had never known them to be used. As such, the guard station was unmanned and Follett and the other man, whose name Hux had been unable to remember during the forced march from his shuttle to the building, were able to easily open the closest cell and throw Hux inside, slamming the door behind him. The bars to the cell hummed with energy and the lock clicked into place.

“We’ll be back for you later,” Follett said, still fiddling with the controls at the guard station. “Once we find the Commandant’s body, we’ll have you on murder charges.”

“I didn’t realize you were also members of the military police,” Hux drawled. “How exciting for you to be conducting an official investigation.”

“Shut up,” said the one whose name Hux didn’t remember. To Follett, he said, “Let’s go.” The elevator doors whirred open and the two of them stepped in without even a backward glance at Hux.

The doors shut and Hux waited for a minute, then two, to be sure they weren’t going to return. Then he screamed.

How could he have been so stupid? How could he have failed to see this coming? It had been idiotic naïveté, the worst type of wishful thinking, that he could ever escape his awful father’s detestable legacy. He was angry with his father, angry with his father’s brainless pack of proteges, but most of all angry with himself. That he could have ever thought it would be that easy to rid himself of his past.

But that couldn’t matter now. Hux had a problem to solve, and no one was better at solving problems than he was. The energy field surrounding the prison bars hummed softly. The bars themselves were unbreakable with what he had on him (essentially nothing); he spared a single thought for Ren’s lightsaber, surely able to melt through metal, but contemplating the impossible was an exercise in futility. The hinges were on the outside of the door, intentionally out of reach of a prisoner inside the cell. He thought of every old Imperial tale of prison breaks; almost every one involved the prisoner having a contact on the outside.

Imperial tales.

Like much of the technology the First Order used, the original design of the prison cells was Imperial with only minor modifications. And if Hux was familiar with anything, it was Imperial blueprints.

The lock on the door was activated—and deactivated—by the energy field. Hux didn’t need to unlock the door, he needed to disrupt the energy; if he did so, the door would most likely unlock automatically. It was the single failing of the old Imperial cell designs, and why every Imperial prison had a redundant system that wouldn’t allow for interruption of power. Generating power had never been a problem for the Empire, so instead of redesigning their flawed system they had strengthened it as-is. And if those who founded the Order had a blind spot, it was loyalty to and trust in their Imperial predecessors, flaws and all.

Hux had never been more grateful.

The problem now was how to disrupt the energy field. Suppressing his usual distaste for kneeling on the floor, Hux was able to determine the point at which the current left the wall and where, if his theory was correct, it could be disrupted. Nothing organic, obviously, could work; if he were wearing his uniform, the flat metal belt buckle might have served, but all he had were the clothes Ren had given him, the leather Oxford boots, the holster for his (stolen) blaster, and—

The data drives. Oren and his band of idiots had only thought to disarm Hux, not to actually search him. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the two small drives: hard plastic coating over an elegant combination of metal and circuits, each containing thousands of pages of data that, even if it were contained in the Order’s archives, it would take Hux years to access. He held the drives in his hand and their plastic casings clicked softly together.

Hadn’t Hux already made this choice, though?

Hux took one of the drives between his fingers and stuck the short blunt end of his thumbnail into the plastic casing; his nail twisted painfully but the casing snapped into two pieces, falling away from the metal skeleton of the drive. His thumb still throbbing, Hux wedged one of the flat plastic pieces into a crevice in the metal and pried it, too, into two separate pieces. The wires connecting the little circuit inside were loosely splayed. He tugged the circuit away from the metal and let it fall to the ground.

The only problem with this plan, Hux thought, was that he had no real idea of how strong the current was, and it was entirely possible that he would be electrocuted while carrying it out. It was also entirely possible that even if he disrupted the current for a moment, he wouldn’t be able to hold the metal in place long enough to allow the door to open on its own. His best bet would be to kick the door open as soon as the field failed, and to hope that even if the lock activated again, the door would be open and the bolt wouldn’t catch. He spent only a moment preparing himself, sitting on the floor, one foot already braced on the door.

_I hope I don’t die before I get to see Ren’s face_ , he thought, and then he put the metal pieces in the line of the current.

Getting mildly electrocuted turned out to be a great way of breaking out of jail, Hux realized as he came to on the floor of the cell, heart racing, arms numb, the door humming with electricity but ajar. He scrambled to his feet, picking up the unbroken data drive and the likely ruined circuit from the destroyed drive and shoving them back into his pocket.

His legs were a little shaky but he dashed toward the elevator, jabbing the call button and then nearly collapsing against its wall as he fell through its open doors. His head throbbed, maybe from the electricity but maybe from all the times he was recently punched in the face. He gingerly prodded at his cheek as the elevator whirred to life, carrying him upward. His cheek wasn’t as bad as his jaw, he quickly discovered; the pistol-whipping he had received had broken the skin in a jagged line along the bottom of his jaw and the area was swollen and tender, likely darkening with a bruise. It was difficult to judge how long he’d been unconscious, but he hoped Oren didn’t have too much of a head start.

The expanse of the landing field seemed impossibly vast but Hux set off across it at a jog, unwilling to waste any more time in pursuit of his enemies. His body ached, his limbs tingled, the air felt nearly liquid as he breathed it, but he pressed on toward his shuttle. The door had been left open, he saw as he approached, and though everything seemed to be in working order (why disable a shuttle when you were throwing its owner in a prison cell?), the damp air had permeated the ship and left a slippery sheen on its surfaces. Hux grimaced and immediately powered it on, setting the air cycling to maximum as he went through the startup sequence as fast as he possibly could. Caskey hadn’t deleted the coordinates to SR-27, nor his previous logs, and he set the ship’s course. Hyperdrive functional. Lightspeed calculations. The shuttle lifted off the ground.

Once the ship’s autopilot had taken over and Hux was hurtling through hyperspace, he had nothing to do but wait until he arrived at Ren’s planet. He finally checked his face in the small mirror of the ship’s refresher, mildly horrified at what he saw, and tried to administer what medical care he could to himself. He rinsed his mouth and spat blood into the sink. He had seen Ren in a fight, he told himself. If Ren hadn’t been so intent on saving Hux from the wolves, he would never have been overwhelmed. He could handle himself for the small window of time before Hux got there. Hux had to believe that.

There were several spare weapons on his shuttle; not only another blaster, which he immediately checked and holstered, but several vibroblades and a long-range rifle. He tucked one of the blades into his right boot and considered the rifle. It would slow his progress slightly, but that was worth the ability to pick off his enemies before they even knew he was there. He placed it on the seat beside him, and then he waited.

SR-27 was the same nearly uniform gray mass it had been before, surrounded by only the thinnest shell of atmosphere. As the shuttle burst through the sparse mist of the few clouds that wreathed the planet, the gray rock resolved into rough peaks and valleys, broken in places by the pale green and brown cover of coniferous trees. The planet was as unremarkable as ever, but Hux felt strangely protective of it, familiar as he was with its thin, cool air; the scraggly trees that struggled up the mountains; the ever-changing color of the sky, from the bright gray of daytime to the vibrant reds and purples of twilight. It galled him to know that Oren and his ilk had even set foot here, and Hux meant to exact righteous vengeance upon them.

Hux noted with no little irritation that the bastards had even taken his parking spot: the clearing in which he had landed his shuttle when he had first visited this planet was partially occupied by a black-and-silver Omicron-class shuttle with tacky red stripe embellishments. He expertly landed his shuttle alongside the Omicron, avoiding scraping his landing gear across its folded wings only out of respect to his own ship. Even before the ramp had fully descended Hux was striding down its length and, with one hand braced on the extension mechanism, swinging off the side to land in a half-crouch on the familiar gravelly surface of SR-27. The rifle whose strap he had slung over his shoulder knocked gently against his shoulder blade; he steadied it with his hand and broke into a run.

He focused on the mechanical movements of his body, the insistent beat of his heart and the rhythmic thud of his boots against the rocky path that led to the castle, the burn of the cold air in his lungs, the steady rocking of the rifle against his back. It was still daylight, but just barely: that familiar purple was beginning to overtake the bright gray afternoon sky, the shadows growing ever longer. The bones of Hux’s knees and hips seemed to grind together as he ran, the shock of each step jolting through his exhausted body. Just a little farther.

He heard the commotion before he saw it: the echoing sound of blaster bolts being fired; some scattered shouting; the low, crackling hum of Ren’s lightsaber; and something else—energy sizzling against energy, punctuating the electric sound of the lightsaber swinging in an arc. The path curved and Hux pressed his back to some of the sloping rocks that lined the way, able to peer around the side without being seen.

The first thing Hux saw was the prone body of the one whose name he didn’t remember, the man who, with Follett, had dragged Hux to the detention cell. He clearly wouldn’t be a problem. The other three were in some kind of battle with Ren, though Caskey and Follett were holding defensive positions to either side of Oren, likely holding back after seeing what had happened to their companion. Oren was shooting what seemed like an endless series of blaster bolts at Ren, and the saber arc–energy noise Hux had heard was revealed to be the sound of Ren almost effortlessly intercepting each bolt with his lightsaber, sending the bolts to harmlessly burn into the ground or the stone walls that rose along either side of the pathway. Hux could barely see Ren’s body as Oren standing directly between Hux and Ren. The only signs of Ren’s vitality were the swift movements of the glowing saber and the intermittent flash of the ragged edges of his robe. Caskey was, on closer look, clutching her right shoulder, possibly a victim of a stray bolt and clearly rendered nearly useless against Ren.

As Hux didn’t have a clear line on Oren, he determined that Follett was the clearest threat here. With Ren’s focus entirely on Oren, Follett was most likely to get in a lucky shot that would incapacitate Ren—or worse. Hux knelt on the uneven stone of the pathway, half of his body still shielded behind the rocks, and hoisted the rifle. He set the stock in the curve of his shoulder and rested his cheek just barely against its smooth length, aligning the sights. He moved his finger to the trigger. He took a breath.

Follett collapsed immediately, his knees buckling and the black-clad mass of his body slumping in a heap to the ground. Hux swung his rifle toward Caskey even as she screamed Oren’s name, her blaster held in front of her as she whipped around to see Hux.

Hux fired at Caskey as she turned; he saw the jolt of her body as the bolt grazed her arm, but it didn’t stop her from raising her blaster and firing at him. Hux dodged behind the stone but her shot went wide anyway, arcing toward a copse of trees. Caskey was, he guessed, already running toward him. The motion of her body would make her shots erratic at best, and at this distance he still had the advantage with the rifle. He hoisted the rifle, gazed down its barrel, and peered out from behind the rock wall.

Caskey had approached him in a straight line; lazy, he thought. She began to fire at him as soon as he appeared, a lucky bolt sizzling worryingly close by Hux’s hair, but Hux aligned the sights and fired. Caskey, like Follett, collapsed to the ground, her momentum carrying her to a sliding stop against the pathway.

The sound of Oren’s bolts paused.

“Caskey?” Oren said. “Caskey!”

Hux removed the energy pack from the rifle and put it in his pocket, dropping the rifle to the ground.

“Your lackeys can’t help you now, Oren,” Hux said, pulling his blaster pistol from its holster and stepping out from behind his cover.

“You!” Oren said, predictably. He had backed away from Ren and his head whipped between Hux and Ren, trying to evaluate which of them was the greater threat.

“I’m afraid so,” Hux said.

“Hux!” Ren gasped.

“Don’t move any closer,” Oren said, apparently choosing Hux as the threat and raising his blaster accordingly.

“DON’T!” Ren yelled, the peculiar staticky interference so familiar to Hux, and the hand that wasn’t holding the lightsaber shot forward in a dark blur. Oren’s body lifted into the air, his limbs splayed and trembling from shock, and then flew backward, slamming into the nearly sheer stone wall lining the pathway to the castle with a loud crack.

Hux took off toward Ren even before Oren crashed to the ground, sidestepping Caskey’s body, barely seeing the blackened blaster marks that spotted the ground, needing only to be close to Ren, to know he was safe. The lightsaber powered off and Ren set off toward Hux, too, clearly intending to meet him halfway, though his peculiar lumbering gait was slower and more lopsided than usual.

“You’re hurt,” Hux said immediately as they stopped in front of each other.

“You came back,” Ren replied.

“Yes, of course I came back,” Hux said distractedly. “Where are you hurt?” He holstered his weapon and reached toward Ren.

“You came back,” Ren said again, as though in awe. His voice was so gentle.

“What did they—” Hux began.

Ren’s mask seemed to explode inward, collapsing in a mess of plastic and metal. His head jerked back with the force of the impact and his body seemed to almost become weightless for a moment, the fluttering edges of his robes caught in front of him as the mass of his body fell backward.

“REN!” Hux felt himself scream.

Ren’s body hit the ground with a thud: limp. Hux dropped to his knees, the impact jarring his body. He reached weakly toward Ren’s destroyed mask but curled his hands back at the last moment and rested them instead on the broad, warm plane of Ren’s chest. It was still.

“No, no, no, no,” Hux repeated. He felt dizzy and weightless. It couldn’t end like this. Not when he had been so close. When they had been so close.

There was a scraping noise behind him and Hux startled back from Ren’s body, his hands dragging over the roughly textured fabric of Ren’s tunic. He felt the curve of the bottom of Ren’s ribcage and the slope of his stomach, then the thick leather edge of Ren’s belt. When he tore his eyes (blurred; he blinked rapidly) from Ren’s body, he saw Oren dragging himself painfully into a sitting position, a blaster pistol clutched in one hand. He was smiling. Hux wanted to vomit.

“Could it be we were wrong?” Oren rasped. “Could it be you weren’t disposing of Brendol’s body at all, but on some kind of”—he coughed—“romantic tryst with this monster?”

Hux’s hand slid along the sleek leather curve of Ren’s belt. The lightsaber was hooked in its usual spot, its extinguished blade end scraping uselessly against the ground. Ren couldn’t protect himself with it, in the end, Hux thought mechanically. His fingers slid over the ridges of its cooling vanes.

Hux took the lightsaber hilt in his hand and he stood, still feeling weightless and dreamlike. The shadows had grown long, extending over the path to the castle, but Oren was in one of the few remaining spots of light, still attempting to drag himself upright. Hux slowly walked toward him.

“I’m barely even surprised,” Oren continued, looking up at Hux.

Hux powered the lightsaber on. It squealed with energy, crackling and humming in his hand, an extension of his arm, of his will. Cutting through Oren’s forearm felt like nothing at all, a simple flick of his wrist, a blurred motion of the blade, Oren screaming and screaming.

“Listen,” Hux said softly.

“Oh, god,” Oren said, openly weeping now, slumped back to the ground. “My hand. My fucking hand.”

“Listen,” Hux said again. He placed one foot on Oren’s chest, the toe of his boot near the base of Oren’s thick throat. “I want you to know this before you die.”

Oren sniffled and gasped and looked up at Hux. The side of his head was bleeding, his face red and contorted with tears.

“Brendol Hux died pathetically and without honor,” Hux said in that same soft, measured tone. “And I only regret I’ve not the patience to make you beg for your life the way he did.” And he spun the lightsaber in his hand and brought it down in a single, sweeping line just below Oren’s jaw.

Hux powered the lightsaber off as Oren’s head rolled away from his body. The ground was clean except for a burned line where the tip of the saber had intersected the stone. Hux turned and walked back to Ren’s body.

Ren was huge and still and silent, his arms splayed to either side of his broad torso, black-gloved palms turned up toward the darkening sky. Hux remembered his own gloves, destroyed during his escape attempt, disappeared into Ren’s room. Ren had wanted them. Ren had wanted him. The lightsaber clattered from his hand to the ground and he fell, not like before but in a boneless slump over Ren’s body.

“Don’t go,” he gasped. “Please, don’t go. I can’t—I came back. I came back for you. I should have realized it sooner.” His hands clutched at the thick robes. “You can’t leave, not when I’ve just come back for you. Please.” He buried his face in the warm folds of Ren’s cowl, just below Ren’s destroyed mask. His cheeks were warm and wet with tears. “Don’t go,” he whispered into the fabric, into the collar beneath it, into the soft pale curve of skin he had seen that one morning in Ren’s room, so long ago. “I love you.”

There was a feeling in the air like electricity around them, a dry crackling, and Hux felt the hairs at the back of his neck stand on end. He lifted his head from where he had pressed it to Ren’s chest and glanced up at the sky, but the indigo expanse was still and cloudless. The feeling grew stronger, skittering down Hux’s arms, humming through his ribcage.

A burst of energy rocked through Hux, knocking him away from Ren’s body. His ears ringing for a second time that day, he lifted himself on his elbows.

Ren’s chest was heaving, his arms lifting weakly off the ground. He gasped.

“Ren!” Hux scrambled forward. “Ren, Ren, oh my god,” he said, pressing his hands to Ren’s shuddering body to feel its movement.

“Hux,” Ren whispered. The sound was strange and unfamiliar and Hux realized his voice was no longer filtered through the mask’s vocal modulator. This was _Ren’s voice_ he was hearing.

Hux brought his hands up to Ren’s mask. “How do I get this off,” he asked, sliding his hands over the metal panels of the mask.

Ren’s hands caught Hux’s, his gloved palms to the pale backs of Hux’s hands, and he guided Hux to the catches that released the vocabulator. The left side of the mask, undamaged, released without issue, but the right side was melted into place. Hux scrabbled at it uselessly with his fingers.

“I can’t—” he said desperately. “Wait.” He reached down and extracted the vibroblade he had hidden in his boot.

“Where was that hidden,” Ren laughed weakly as Hux brought the blade up to the mask. Without the modulation, his voice was deep and soft. Hux’s heart seemed to flutter.

“In my boot, you maniac,” Hux said roughly, unable to keep a smile from his face. He gently nudged the tip of the blade into the latch and twisted it. There was a grinding metallic noise, but the latch released and the lower part of the mask lifted. Hux dropped the blade beside them and gingerly placed his hands on either side of the base of the helmet. “Can you help me?” Hux asked.

Ren’s hands came up beside Hux’s and together they slid the mask off Ren’s head.

“Oh,” Hux said numbly.

Ren was beautiful. A broad red line, a burn from melted metal, ran from the side of Ren’s jaw to just below his right eye, mottling the pale skin around it with pink-red inflammation. But his lips were thick and plush, softly pink, and his eyes wide and dark, gazing earnestly up at Hux. The pale skin of his face was, as Hux had suspected—almost fantasized—after skating his fingertips over the curves of Ren’s shoulders and the slope of his back, spotted with a few marks: above his eyebrow, beside his prominent nose. Hux reverently brushed his fingertips over the slope of Ren’s uninjured cheek.

“I’m… sorry?” Ren breathed.

“You should be,” Hux said, feeling tears well up in his eyes again. “You kept this lovely face beneath a mask this whole time.”

“Oh,” Ren said, his eyebrows drawing together, or trying to, and he winced, pain skittering across his face, eyes closing. “Oh,” he said again, eyes still closed, and a glittering tear slid down the side of his face toward his hairline.

“Ren,” Hux said softly. “Look at me.”

Ren opened his eyes and Hux leaned toward him very slowly, his hand now sliding into the thick damp mass of Ren’s hair to cradle his head. He paused with his lips barely brushing Ren’s, breathing him in, his sweat and burned skin and blood and the lingering ozone scent of his lightsaber, now wreathing them both.

Ren gasped and pressed up, closing the gap between them, his lips warm and full against Hux’s. Warmth suffused Hux’s whole body, all the parts where he touched Ren, their mouths and hands and chests, but the rest of him, too, the hard planes and jagged edges inside him, all the awful thoughts and terrible numbnesses he kept hidden away. Ren was alive, and Hux was, too.


End file.
